Saturday, February 10, 2007

Reviewed: More 9/11-related Fiction

Another attempt to make sense of the 9/11-era American scene through fiction, Once in a Promised Land(Beacon) by Laila Halaby, is reviewed in the Chicago Tribune. Kathryn Masterson writes, in part:

In her second novel, "Once in a Promised Land," Jordanian-American author Laila Halaby takes readers back to that time when American flags fluttered from car antennas and people were either with us or against us. She places her protagonists, a well-off Arab couple living in Tucson, in that moment to explore the effect on their lives of hijackers' flying planes into buildings on the other side of the country....

However acclimated they are to American life, Jassim and Salwa are foreigners in a land now hostile to people who look like they do. As their American dream life is pulled out from under them, Salwa decides their adopted country is too crass and corrupt to live there anymore.